'Sprawl' isn't always a bad idea

By BILL VIRGIN, P-I COLUMNIST

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, September 10, 2007

MICROSOFT AND F5 last week announced their contributions to alleviating the pain of commuting and congestion for their employees and the region, with the tech companies announcing new large campuses in Seattle and Bellevue, respectively.

In doing so, they helped highlight, however unintentionally, an overlooked, unappreciated and underpraised but highly promising approach to unsnarling traffic in the Puget Sound region.

It's time to give a cheer-anda-half to sprawl.

Not sprawl of people. That issue was long ago decided by the people themselves who, finding central-city living neither attractive nor affordable, went scouting for homes they wanted and could actually buy, even if that meant pushing the metropolis to Marysville in the north and Thurston County to the south.

Instead, the sprawl that hasn't occurred enough yet, and which ought to be encouraged, is sprawl of employment.

Sprawl is typically villainized as the generator of congestion. The more people there are, and the farther out they live, the farther they are from work and thus the worse the commute becomes as too many people try to get to the same place at the same time.

But congestion is not just a function of how many cars are on the road. It's also a function of what time they're on the road, what direction they're traveling, how far they're going and the corollary factor of how long they're on the road.

If you've got everyone trying to funnel into a handful of choke points (Interstate 5 north and south of the city, Interstate 405, the two bridges across the lake) in the same direction at roughly the same time to get to roughly the same point, that's a problem. If, however, you've got a lot of people heading in multiple directions on multiple routes to multiple destinations and at multiple times (that last factor being one discussed in this space recently), maybe not so much.

The Puget Sound Regional Council put together an interesting analysis off 2000 Census data: the percentage of the work force who live within five, 10, 15, 20 and 25 miles of their primary job.

The largest segment is, in fact, people who live within five miles of their job, but that's still less than a third, at 29 percent. The percentages, then, as you might expect, decline for each five-mile segment: 23 percent for five to 10 miles, 17 percent for 10 to 15 miles, 12 percent for 15 to 20 miles and 8 percent for 20 to 25 miles. Then it ticks back up, to 11 percent for 25 miles or more.

Imagine the effect on regional traffic of shifting a few percentage points from one category to the next, shorter-distance group. What might the difference be in turning some of those Tacoma-to-Seattle and Lynnwood-to-Bellevue hauls into Kent-to-Federal Way or Mountlake Terrace-to-Everett jaunts?

Microsoft and F5 say they're trying to improve recruitment and retention by offering new facilities in Seattle and Bellevue, by tapping the available labor pools in each city and helping existing and potential employees avoid the much-dreaded cross-lake commute. The happy consequence is that they might help nudge a few percentage points to migrate.

Provided, of course, that other companies follow suit. The tricky part is figuring out how to give that trend an encouraging shove forward.

Shortening commuting distances might have a much bigger impact on congestion than building expensive new rail lines. But it's much harder to engineer some sort of incentive for employers and employees to locate close to one another. Even if you wanted to create yet another government program, could you structure tax incentives in a way to encourage companies to give hiring preference to those who live close to their place of employment? Would such a program even work, given that employers are having to scrounge across the entire region to find qualified employees in such a tight labor market?

Maybe official incentives aren't needed. If a prospective employee has a choice between comparable jobs, the major difference being the length of commute, the tangible (fuel, car maintenance) and intangible (time, frustration) costs might just be the sort of decision influencers that in the aggregate trigger a broad shift in where people live relative to where they work.

Such shifts have happened before. In many cities, employers lured by cheap land to accommodate their expansion moved to office parks in suburban communities (often ringing the metropolitan area along an outer-belt interstate); residential development followed them.

It could happen again, and maybe it already is, as evidenced by the Microsoft and F5 announcements. Much as people took the problem of affordable housing into their own hands, employers may decide to implement their own solutions to regional traffic congestion by decentralizing their operations and moving parts closer to where their employees live.

Perhaps the biggest roadblock, pardon the term, to employment sprawl is the term itself, given how much condemnation the mere word draws. So we'll have to find something else to call it, without losing sight of the underlying principles and gains to be had.

Sprawl may not be palatable as a term, and it may attract few adherents as an official policy. But as a low-cost, privately initiated and reasonably effective tool that benefits employers, employees and the region as a whole, everyone may grow to like it, whatever it happens to be called.